The present invention relates to a test rig and particularly to testing apparatus for simulating the dynamic characteristics of a vehicle crash in a laboratory situation, for testing safety restraint apparatus.
Traditionally test rigs comprise dynamic sleds mounted on tracks for rapid acceleration. For practical reasons safety restraint testing is done under conditions of acceleration rather than deceleration.
However, traditional reverse acceleration dynamic test rigs are extremely expensive and space consuming and do not accurately simulate the conditions prevalent from transverse components of crash forces such as occur in side impacts.
In particular it is difficult in known test rigs accurately to reproduce the deployment gap due to the intrusion of a vehicle the door and B-pillar in a lateral impact and therefore difficult to correlate the contact times of the vehicle occupant with the door and B-pillar sills or trims. In addition, different vehicles have door and B-pillar arrangements with different characteristics and the three dimensional nature of the side impact velocity profile will shape the sills and the force will be transferred in different degrees to different sections. Hence accurate representation of the acceleration and velocity profiles for different sections of different vehicles is virtually impossible with known test rigs.
Accurate side impact test results have only hitherto been achieved by using virtually a complete vehicle body coated with a honeycomb foam barrier. Such a test is prohibitively expensive since a new body and new foam barrier is required for each test.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a relatively inexpensive re-usable and compact test rig capable of accurately simulating a wider range of side impact crash velocity profiles and pulses and of a variety of intrusion profiles, than hitherto possible.
The invention also aims to provide for pole testing, i.e. to simulate the conditions of impact with a single object such as a tree. This has not otherwise been possible with known dynamic sled arrangements.
According to the present invention there is provided a test rig for impact testing on vehicles,
the rig comprising:
a mounting platform PA2 means for securing an item, or arrangement to be tested, to the platform, PA2 an array of actuators mounted in close proximity to the mounting platform, PA2 means for selectively extending any one or more or any combination of the actuators in a direction towards the mounting platform, PA2 wherein the holding means is adjustable to enable the test item or arrangement to be mounted at any one of a plurality of positions relative to the array of actuators.
Preferably there is provided means for controlling the extension and the acceleration of each actuator, in accordance with predetermined crash and vehicle profile characteristics, and means for recording the reaction forces on each actuator.
According to a preferred embodiment removable shaped padding is fixed to the actuator array.
For a better understanding of the present invention and to show how the same may be carried into effect, reference will now be made to the accompanying drawings in which: